Internet overload?

It seems to us that since the Olympics started, access to the Internet has become an iffy proposition.

We will have all the lights green on our DSL modem one minute, and then the Internet light goes off or even turns red. When this happens, the DSL blinks green.

This can happen every few minutes and be OK for a few minutes. It can be OK for hours and be off for many minutes or even hours.

Saturday night we had iffy access; two minutes on, one minute off. Sunday night we had almost continuous access. This morning we had access, then didn't, then did, and now we haven't had access for over an hour.

I wondered about our having an Apple Time Capsule added to our home network. I also wondered if our modem was going bad. Pushing reset or pulling the plug seems to make no difference: if it was working, it still works; if it wasn't working, it still won't work.

I also wondered about our phone company having problems. I talked to a friend who lives about a mile away about this. He has cable and has also been having spotty access.

It would be interesting to see if there is any correlation to these problems with access peaks to either NBCOlympics.com or YouTube.

A final irony. I went to Qwest's home page and eventually to a discussion group. Just as I was registering to join the group, access disappeared!

No, one more irony. The phone rang downstairs and I tried to answer upstairs on the headset. Nothing! I tried the wall phone. Nothing. When I tried downstairs, I got a dial tone (the caller never left a message). I checked the wall jack upstairs. It was out for enough that a light kick would pull it out. Have I been kicking the jack all along or pushing a wastebasket against it? However, why did the red internet light come on and go off? We shall see this evening when local web traffic goes up.

Computer idiosyncrasies and persistence

This morning I enlarged the text of an email message with Entourage of Microsoft Office for the Mac. Suddenly, everytime I moved the mouse the whole screen moved and the display was larger than the physical screen. Fortunately, the pointer moved faster than the screen, and so I could move the pointer to where I needed it. However, this was very annoying and distracting.

I tried resetting the screen size with System Preference, but each resolution gave a bigger screen than the physical display.

I checked that I still had AppleCare but it's Sunday and probably no one is available.

I talked to a friend who is a computer technician at the local university. He had heard about it but couldn't remember the fix.

I often find searching Apple's Knowledge Base a big chore, and so I just did a Google search. The first couple of phrases didn't work, but

macintosh screen bigger display

as separate words got me about 209,000 hits. I was lucky in that the answer was in the first five results. It was at

http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-37588.html

Somebody had this problem with OS9 on an iBook in April 2005. The answer was to check Universal Access in System Preferences. Sure enough, Zoom was set on. I turned Zoom off and everything went back to normal. BIG SIGH OF RELIEF!

Why did this happen? How could Entourage turn this on or off? I have increased the text size before without side effects.

When I looked back at Universal Access I noticed that increase zoom in was cmd-option-= and zoom out was cmd-option-- Maybe, just maybe I had not used cmd-shift-= for Entourage text enlargement but had used cmd-option-= Nah! I'm sure that I had used the Edit menu rather than the keyboard. Curiouser and curiouser.

In any case, thanks, Dan, for your help.